17 November 2008

Jobvite Garnering Press Attention

Applicant tracking system vendor, Jobvite, with whom I am a customer of at my workplace, has been garnering some public relations attention recently.

The September 2008 issue of Workforce Management Online included this article by Michelle Rafter, in which the new executives hired from Yahoo! HotJobs and the many competitors faced by Jobvite are mentioned.

Earlier today, Cheezhead writer Vanessa Dennis gave Jobvite's new CEO a call to let him express his predictions for the recruitment market and also his views on how corporate staffing for small and medium businesses allocate their budget spend.

In my opinion, Jobvite is at a critical inflection point in their business. They have a bunch of enthusiastic customers, most of whom are small and in the San Francisco Bay Area. They have a system that works and has an intuitive user interface, something which most ATS vendors utterly lack. They have good VC funding and new executive leadership.

But, they are also facing reducing market prices and a vast number of competitors. Social networking trends and tools are both advancing and distracting from proven corporate staffing practices. On the one hand, Jobvite needs to continue to support the core recruitment and administration functionality that its customers need to survive as an employer, while on the other hand, it also has to keep pace with software as a service trends, and outpace its ATS competitors as online communities, persistently connected youth, and innovative Web 2.0 tools rapidly evolve.

At this critical inflection point, Jobvite faces the risk of doing too much or doing too little. Develop core tools, chase the latest trends, ramp up a professional consulting team, or bunker down and wait for the recession to run its course. Can they cross Geoffrey Moore's technology adoption curve chasm?

Despite all these risks, I feel Jobvite is better positioned than any of its other competitors to have a shot at healthy growth over the next few years.